Ballmer: ‘We are not interested in e-readers’

Any speculation that Microsoft was looking to jump on the Kindle bandwagon was squashed Thursday when CEO Steve Ballmer gave a resounding no.

Ballmer

“We have a device for reading. It’s the most popular device in the world. It’s the PC,” Ballmer said Thursday, as reported by Reuters.

“I would love to see companies like Amazon and others bring their books to the PC,” Ballmer said. “Hopefully we can get that to happen with Barnes & Noble or Amazon or somebody.”

“But no, we are not interested in e-readers ourselves,” he added.

OK, OK, OK. We get the point. No Microsoft e-reader.

Courtesy of Amazon

The Kindle.

But Ballmer did suggest Microsoft would be interested in striking a deal with booksellers to get digital books on the PC. The software giant already offers Microsoft Reader, free software users can download to read e-books on their Windows computers.